Freedom

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?" ~DFW This Is Water

Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing. ~DFW This Is Water

"I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." - Hamlet.

"Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: A fellow of Infinite Jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!" --Shakespeare Hamlet